Free image to Markdown converter
Drop a screenshot, scan or photo and get its text back as clean Markdown — read by OCR that runs entirely in your browser. Turn pictures of words into words an AI can actually use.
Drop an image to convert
or click to browse
How to convert an image to Markdown text
- Drop the image into the box above — PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, BMP or TIFF. The picture stays on your device; the character recognition runs locally in your browser.
- Give it a moment. The first image loads the OCR engine, which takes a few extra seconds; after that, conversions are quick. A progress bar tracks the recognition.
- Download the .md or copy the text into your AI chat — searchable, quotable, editable words instead of a picture the AI has to interpret.
What the converter does with your image
An image is the one format here where the text has to be found before it can be converted. The pipeline gives the OCR engine the best possible shot:
- The image is prepared first — converted to grayscale, contrast-boosted, and upscaled if it's small, so glyphs arrive crisp instead of muddy. If the cleanup ever hurts more than it helps, the original is retried automatically.
- Recognition runs on your device using the Tesseract engine compiled for the browser — the standard open-source OCR that powers countless scanning tools, here without your image going anywhere.
- The result is tidied into paragraphs — line breaks and stray whitespace cleaned up, so the output reads as text rather than as a jumble of scan lines.
- Nothing readable, no fake output. A photo with no words in it — a logo, a landscape — is reported honestly as having no readable text, rather than padded with OCR noise.
A real example
This is actual output from this converter. The input was a PNG — a title line in bold and two lines of body text, the kind of thing a whiteboard photo or slide screenshot contains:
Meeting summary Budget approved for the second quarter. Next review is on Friday at 10am.
Every word came back correctly, as three clean paragraphs — from an image, entirely in the browser, with the picture never leaving the machine.
Got a scanned PDF? This is the page for it
A scanned PDF is photographs in a PDF wrapper — there's no text layer inside, so the PDF converter finds nothing to extract. The fix: export the PDF's pages as PNG or JPG images (most PDF viewers can do this) and drop those images here. The OCR reads the pages the way it reads any other picture of text.
What OCR can and can't do
Printed text is the sweet spot. Screenshots, scans of typed documents, slides photographed straight-on — these read reliably. Recognition is tuned for English text; other Latin-alphabet languages mostly work, but accents and unusual characters get shakier.
Handwriting is a lottery. Neat block capitals sometimes survive; cursive rarely does. Treat handwritten notes as a maybe, and proofread anything that matters.
Quality in, quality out. Blurry photos, low-contrast text, busy backgrounds and text photographed at an angle all cost accuracy. The built-in preprocessing compensates for a lot, but a straight, sharp, well-lit capture beats any amount of cleanup.
Layout isn't reconstructed. Unlike the PDF converter, OCR output is plain paragraphs — a table in a screenshot comes back as lines of text, not a Markdown table. The words arrive; the grid doesn't.
Image conversion questions
Is this image to Markdown converter free?
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Yes — free, unlimited, no account. The OCR engine runs in your browser, so there's no per-image cost for us and no meter for you.
Is my image uploaded to a server?
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No. Recognition runs on your own device. The only network traffic is your browser downloading the OCR engine itself the first time — the software comes to your image, your image never goes to the software.
Can it read a screenshot for ChatGPT or Claude?
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Yes — that's the core use. A screenshot pasted into a chat is processed as an image at image prices; the same content as OCR'd Markdown is a few hundred tokens of plain text the AI can quote, search and reason over precisely.
Which image formats work?
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PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, TIFF and AVIF. SVG files are read from their text labels directly — no OCR needed.
Why did my image come back with 'no readable text'?
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The OCR found no words — usually because the image is a logo, icon or photo without text, or the text is too small or blurry to resolve. Try a sharper capture, or crop to just the text region.
Can it handle a photo of a whiteboard or a book page?
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Usually, if the shot is straight-on and in focus. Printed book pages read well; whiteboard marker is hit-and-miss depending on handwriting. The closer the photo is to a flat scan, the better the result.
PDF to Markdown
For PDFs with a real text layer — headings, paragraphs and tables reconstructed from the layout.
Convert a PDF →ZIP to Markdown
A folder of scans? Zip the images and every one is OCR'd into a single Markdown document.
Convert a ZIP →